Current software engineering practices require the ongoing monitoring and management of hardware and software assets. Hardware assets may include servers, workstations, routers, and other networking equipment. Software assets may include enterprise applications, desktop applications, middleware applications, etc. Previous solutions involve manual review of server statistics, creation of server and middleware software monitoring scripts, or the purchase of software licenses for monitoring and management software packages. These software packages are designed for a particular technical platform (i.e., a specific hardware and software architecture) and are constrained to a particular hardware and software environment requiring multiple software packages to cover a heterogeneous server environment. If changes are made to the hardware software architecture, the prior art software packages may not be sufficient to provide the same level of services. By contrast, the present disclosure provides a comprehensive solution.
IBM's WebSphere MQ™ (“MQ”) is the industry leader for middleware messaging software, and there are a considerable number of software programs available for measuring and monitoring the product and its use of server resources. But these mechanisms reside at or operate on the end points (i.e., a specific node in the hardware and software architecture where applications are getting and putting messages to the MQ interface, a software platform or networking equipment where Queue Managers are communicating with each other, security monitoring interfaces, etc.) as used herein a Queue Manager provides queuing services to applications and manages the queues that belong to them. In some situations, the application is informed that this cannot be done, and appropriate reason code is given. But there is not presently any tool that measures the capacity of the MQ infrastructure.
There are not too many ways MQ infrastructures can be implemented, but the number of different physical components that make up a physical infrastructure can be considerable, especially with larger implementations, from physical or virtual server hardware and configuration, through to all the components that make up a middleware messaging network. So being able to quantify the capacity of a particular implementation is critical as not two implementations will be exactly the same. And there is no single tool out there today that provides the needed collection and analysis able to quantify the actual middleware messaging capacity.